


parameters of humanity

by dragonsinparis



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), F/M, Vampire AU, rating mostly reflective of marinette's level of thirst and potential future installments, things that are not my fault
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-31
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-08-12 06:01:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7923322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonsinparis/pseuds/dragonsinparis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marinette didn’t exactly anticipate that the worst part of being turned into a vampire would be enhanced senses making her crush on Adrien Agreste even more awkward. </p><p>(originally posted on tumblr; based on thunderpot’s amazing au/artwork)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Thunderpot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thunderpot/gifts).



Marinette Dupain-Cheng thought she was into Adrien Agreste before she found herself saddled with overdrive vampire senses, but now sitting behind him in class is something akin to torture.

Weird academically erotic torture, at that. How on earth can the way someone pronounces ‘abdominal cavity’ make her want to pounce on them when the pig they’re dissecting is right there on the table and the overwhelming scent of it is mixing with the equally unpleasant stench of Chloe’s perfume?

The answer, of course, is: because somewhere underneath that olfactory crime against humanity ( _does she count as humanity? Is there a scale? It’s not like she’s killing people. She hasn’t even actually tried blood, although the idea of that - while kind of gross - also sounds as appetizing as a smoothie on a hot day. But whatever. If Chloe gets to be humanity, she gets to be humanity, vampire or not_ ) is the lemongrass scent of Adrien’s shampoo, the smell of his skin (he is always so clean he smells _so good_ god bless that boy’s weird penchant for inappropriately timed showers), the smell of his soft cotton shirt. It’s a light smell, barely perceptible over everything and everyone else in the classroom, but somehow it’s still overwhelming.

And like, it isn’t as if she’d ever really stopped finding him attractive, the boy ( _maaaaaaan_ , her cave-brain whispers) is a goddamn Adonis, but they are about to graduate from high school and she is supposed to be at least partially past the mind-blowing, crippling crush. They are adults, now. More importantly, they are friends. Friends can generally speak in full sentences around one another.  

She can do this. _Don’t think about making out with him. Don’t think about how good he’d taste. In every respect._

He just seems (looks, smells) so _innocent_ , so very fucking edible.

Emphasis on the fucking.

It isn’t necessarily that he’s vulnerable; he’s a trained fencer, and everyone is vulnerable compared to a vampiric superhero. It’s that he’s always so open, in all the ways she’s afraid to be, despite her power.

She used to find it attractive. Now, under all that power, in the face of her own hunger, it feels like an invitation.

She’s read stories about vampires, of course. Everyone has. They’re a mashup of fairytales and the truth, as it turns out: the desire for blood is real, but the need isn’t. The inability to eat food is real, but being burned by the sun isn’t.

She knows that in the stories vampires can bend humans to their will...especially in the romantic sense. ( _Romantic is generous. It’s sexual and she knows it._ ) But she can’t think of a way to test her power there, to see if that’s true, without either risking her secret or committing some kind of horrific violation. Even if she doesn’t actually do anything, playing with someone’s desire via magical sex appeal seems completely out of line. No matter how much she wants Adrien, she can’t justify going after him. Not if there’s a possibility that he’d fall for her supernatural sway instead of for her.

Despite the fact that the crush she thought couldn’t get any worse has been ratcheted up by a thousand, Adrien Agreste is the very definition of _look, don’t touch_.

*

But Chat Noir is an entirely different story, and it’s driving her a little insane.

She knows the minute she sees him that he’s been vamped too. She knew he’d had only a slim chance of staying human - they’d both been bitten at the same time, or at least in the same fight - but the hope had clung like a barnacle. He’d always seemed too pure of heart to ever exist as something other than human.

But his incensors are too long and his movements are too graceful, and her heart breaks a little even as her libido fucking _spikes_.

She can’t know if her vampire mojo would work on Adrien Agreste, but Chat Noir is gorgeous and as flirty as ever and playing with all the same advantages she is.

It feels wrong. A part of her knows it is. No matter how much she cares about Chat Noir, her heart wants Adrien. Giving in to Chat because he’s her only option isn’t fair to him...but it’s hard to remember that he’s anything but a first choice when she wants him _this much_.

And at some point during the akuma fight he gets himself punched in the mouth, his sharp teeth catching the edge of his lips, and then there’s blood down his chin and Ladybug is pretty sure she’s _burning_.  

She isn’t sure how they manage to finish the fight. Despite their new vampiric advantages, it takes longer than it should have. They’re both frantic, both sloppy. They’re both distracted by each other, and all the more so whenever one of them takes a hit. It’s usually him. It’s always been usually him, but like so many other things, that characteristic has been dialed up to eleven.

It hurts her every time - it’s always hurt her - but this time it seems worse, somehow. Every time he gets hit hard enough to bleed, it assaults every one of her senses in a new way: she can hear his rib crack, she can smell his blood.

She aches in sympathy for him, even as her mouth waters.

When the fight is over and the akuma is gone they sit side by side on a rooftop, leaning against a chimney under the open sky, catching their breath.

But catching her breath involves inhaling, and that only makes everything worse. The smell was strong enough, but he's so close that she's convinced she can taste his blood in the air and she can feel the color rushing to her cheeks. She chances a quick furtive look at him and knows immediately that it was a mistake: he’s staring straight at her, cat-eye pupils blown wide, open and yearning and just as hungry.

She looks firmly, pointedly away. It’s the only refusal she can manage; if she’d tried to speak, she never could have gotten a _no_ out.

“My Lady,” he says, quietly. It isn’t an entreaty to change her mind, although her vampiric hearing betrays the _want_ underneath his voice. He wouldn’t ask her to do anything against her own wishes. Rather, it’s an invitation to change her mind: an acknowledgement of his awareness of her own mixed feelings, and an admission that even in the face of them he wants to offer himself to her.

 _How far can you deny someone for their own sake before it becomes less about them and more about your own guilt?_ She wonders. Then again, maybe she’s just trying to justify turning back around. They are the only two people in the world like this, now more than ever before, and ultimately the point is that in the face of such isolation her own guilt and splintered heart don’t matter very much.

When she first kisses him (she doesn’t even remember turning, or closing in) it’s against the blood running down the side of his chin, right under his lips. He shivers slightly at the contact, and then sighs - as if he’d been holding his breath since the beginning and has only just remembered to let the air back out. She kisses his lips and he returns it, his arms coming up around her, though she’s pretty certain he’s far more trapped of the two of them. She isn’t sure, though; she isn’t really sure anything exists outside of them. It isn’t a vampire’s thrall, on her part or on his. It’s that like every other sense, the sense that this is her other half has been amplified and driven into her body like a knife.

She leaves his lips; she follows the blood to his neck. He tilts his head back, offering. She isn’t even sure when her kiss turns to a bite - she hadn’t been intending to do it, she hadn’t been thinking at all about what might come next - but he clearly expected it. He groans in pleasure, and pulls her closer against him.

The blood sings through her like sunlight.

He is all made up of humanity, even as a vampire, and she can taste it in her mouth, in her throat. His body pressed up against hers is muscle connected to bone and woven through with capillaries and veins and every part of him is pulsing, against her and inside of her and she can taste every drop and every drop is a revelation.

And underneath this sensory assault, this nirvana, there is the soft soft smell of cotton and lemongrass shampoo.

Her eyes snap open.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for Jess's birthday I wrote more vampires, I hope you guys like it
> 
> everything is based on @thunderpot's vampire au, nothing is beta'd

“What the _fuck_!” She yell-shrieks, tumbling away from him.

He blinks at her, turning his head from side to side ever-so-slightly. He clearly doesn’t know; he’s clearly trying to figure out how he went from a moment that unquestionably, mind-bogglingly erotic to one where she was making a noise like he’d tried to shove macaroni up her nose. His mind is still fuzzy and his eyes are still clouded with lust even though this moment is becoming less arousing by the second which is definitely not what she ever thought she would say about finding out she’d been making out with Adrien _freaking_ Agreste.  

Adrien _freaking_ Agreste, who has been making sexually suggestive puns at her for three years now while dressed in skintight spandex and cat ears. She knew perfectly well she could have had Chat Noir anytime she wanted, and she'd blown him off. She'd blown him off to chase him around without his mask on.

_Oh my god oh my god oh my god_ , most of her brain says. 

_Not really your god anymore, what with the vampire thing_ , the rest of her brain notes.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, his voice a helpless rasp so thick it could sand granite down to dust.

_So many things_ , is her instinctive reply, but it doesn’t come out.

After all: what is wrong? She is still herself, isn’t she? Which means he is still himself, too. He has to be. The boy she already wants just happens to be the only one she can actually be with, and it turns out that he’s been in love with her too since long before their options had narrowed so aggressively. 

He just doesn’t _know_ that yet.

Which is...interesting.

She wants to think that the long-held instinct to keep her secret identity secret even from him is what makes her disinclined to reveal the truth immediately. And that might be part of it, sure, but it definitely isn’t all.

It also isn’t insecurity. There have been moments, of course, when she felt that her alter ego overshadowed the girl she had been before. But she has come to peace with the duality of her own identity; Ladybug would not be Ladybug without Marinette, and when the fangs pierced her flesh it was Marinette she feared losing to some kind of existential darkness. The fact that he is blinded to the fact that the girl he wants is Marinette doesn’t mean any other girl is waiting for him behind that metaphorical curtain. She knows that when it lifts, when he sees her, he will not hesitate.

No. The truth is that… 

...well, the truth is that the secret is a little intoxicating, in ways it probably shouldn’t be.    

He is still staring at her, waiting for an answer. The clouds in his eyes are starting to clear. She’s waited too long, and even getting what he’s wanted for three years can only distract him for so long when she’s not actually kissing him anymore.

The obvious solution to this, of course, is to _start kissing him again_.

But the morality that kept her from going after human Adrien Agreste - isn’t sure she hasn’t once again tipped the balance of power too far in her own favor. And the paranoid part of her, the part of her that kept her safe as a superhero and now crawls into the shadows as a vampire, worries that something will give her away.

(Had she done anything that might give her away? Had she dropped any clues? Did Adrien Agreste pay enough attention to Marinette Dupain-Cheng that he would notice such a clue if she had?)

_You should give him something to notice_ , a little voice says. The little voice is coming from somewhere decidedly lower than her brain. _He will not hesitate. You already told yourself as much. We both know you’re the girl he wants, in or out of the mask. He’s already yours, and you’re already his._  

“It’s the blood,” she says with a coy little smile. Not a lie entirely, she tells herself, although it certainly isn’t entirely the truth either. “I wasn’t sure I hadn’t hurt you. I’m still trying to get used to the idea - the whole vampire thing.” She licks her lips, leans on an implied double meaning. “You’re my first.” 

When she presses her lips against his again, she can feel the question, the uncertain confusion, on the tip of his tongue. She swallows it, and he doesn’t complain. His mouth is open under hers, his hands are steady against her body but his breathing shakes like a branch in a winter storm. His blood is still on her lips and now it’s on his, their tongues dragging that flare of copper and pulse against one another. They are replicating life; they are drowning in it.

She has got Adrien Agreste, the subject of her every adolescent fantasy, pressed up against her in skintight vinyl. Spandex. Whatever. The point is that the fabric is so thin it may as well not be there at all, and the tentative and awful lure of the almost-touch is growing with every move they make, every inch of friction. She’s so utterly lost in it, this thing she meant to use to control him, that she doesn’t even notice when she falls into a pit of bliss and realizes -  

He’s bitten her.

_Oh shit._

She pulls back; he’s got a smile ready, even if it’s one full of heady lust. He rolls his shoulders, letting his head dip side to side in self-satisfaction, but his eyes never leave hers. He knows exactly what he’s done. 

Neither of them will be able to hide now.

_Reckless asshole._

“This isn’t going to heal overnight,” she hisses. “What am I supposed to tell people?“ So what if she bit him first. So what if it was the most erotic thing she’s ever experienced. She at least was a little more _subtle_ about it! 

He shrugs, grins. “Tell them a rabid cat bit you.”

*

On one hand, wearing a scarf is not exactly a crime against fashion, as long as it’s a nice one. She never would have made one for the son of Gabriel freakin’ Agreste if it had been. On the other hand, she’s about to graduate from high school and it’s not exactly cool outside which makes scarf code for _I have a hickey_. Which makes it noticeable.

Alya definitely notices. 

“Girl, YES!” she says when they meet up in front of the school, her voice pitched low but ending on a squeal. “Who’s the lucky teeth?” 

“The teeth are mostly lucky I didn’t punch them in for doing this.”

Alya laughs. Marinette isn’t actually kidding, but she manages a small smile; she tells herself it’s because Alya doesn’t press further. She tightens the knot on the scarf and follows her best friend into the classroom. 

Adrien is already there.

Strictly speaking, Adrien is mostly asleep with his head on the desk. Nino is carefully putting paper planes made out of post-it notes into the blond’s hair, which clearly has not been combed. Gabriel Agreste would have a fit, which is pretty much the only sexy thing about the paper planes. On the other hand, it’s hard to stay mad at a guy lying helpless on his desk with tiny paper planes in his hair.

She and Alya slide into their seats behind the boys. Nino’s eyes shift to the scarf and glint.

_Here it comes._

“Fun night?” He asks innocently.

“Not really,” she says, as nonchalant as possible.

“A scarf usually indicates a fun night in my book,“ he says. “At least when it’s this hot out.“ He nudges Adrien. “Right, man?” 

“Absolutely,” Adrien mumbles, obvious unable to care less about this conversation when the alternative is a nap.

“So what happened?“ Nino asks.

_Give him something to notice_ , the voice says again.

“A rabid cat bit me,” she says, flat and pointed and staring straight at Adrien’s blissful almost-napping head on his desk.

His eyes snap open.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm off to DragonCon tomorrow (huzzah!!) but I'll get a lot more writing time than I've had all summer once I get home, and I'll probably poke at this some more eventually (maybe??) when I'm not working on my angst monster fic. 
> 
> Go check out the art that inspired this at Thunderpot's tumblr: http://thunderpot.tumblr.com/post/148323781503/get-some-doodle-dump-for-the-vampire-au-cause-yes
> 
> My tumblr is over here: http://dragonsinparis.tumblr.com/


End file.
